


named herein

by unveiled



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-03 23:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Have passport, will travel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	named herein

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pearl_o](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearl_o/gifts).



_1960_

Charles's eyes gave him away, when he pressed her newly-minted passport into her hands. His patriarch's gaze — blue and self-assured — flicked past her face, just for a second, before returning to her and the green-bound booklet.

"I'm sorry this was the best I could do," he said, voice breaking slightly at the end, once again the boy who saved her.

"You're a dummy," Raven said, throwing her arms around him.

 

* * *

_1952_

"When you're older, we'll go travelling," he promised, once upon a time, and pulled her close. "We'll go anywhere you want. Everywhere."

They'd read every atlas in the Xavier mansion, even the ones so obviously obsolete the maids rarely bothered to sweep their dusters over the covers — with countries and empires that were wiped out from the map. Charles blew off the dust and cracked them opened, history spilling out from his eidetic memory: the Mughal Empire, whose sultan was overthrown by another, foreign empire; and the Kingdom of Württemberg, part of the once-great German Empire, where Albert Einstein was born.

Raven had traced the borders of the Ottoman Empire and imagined herself in Constantinople — "Istanbul," Charles corrected, because he was an annoying know-it-all — looking up at the wondrous vastness of Hagia Sophia. She'd dog-eared pages upon pages of encyclopedias over Charles's huffy objections, and they'd both read _King Solomon's Mines_ together as children, play-acting the part of adventurers.

Even when they were grown — or almost — every map was a journey waiting to happen, every country name an adventure promised to each other.

"Are you still enlisting in the army?" she asked, late into 1952, headbutting his arm gently as they dozed in the library, sprawled before the radio.

He hesitated. She knew his eyes turned toward the Korean Peninsula, to the war they only knew through newspapers and a man's disembodied voice on the radio. Charles chafed at the strictures of their home as much as she did, for all that Cain Marko sneered at his love for books and classrooms.

"No, I'm perfectly content to remain here," Charles lied, as if he'd never told her about his plans to fool the recruiters with his telepathy, make them think he was 18 and the adult he wasn't.

_Liar_ , she thought.

_I'm not lying!_ he insisted, projecting the words into her head like the peal of a gong.

Raven wriggled out from his embrace. "Stay out of my head, Charles."

"I'm trying, I swear," he said, the corners of his mouth bowing down in unhappiness. "And I'm not lying, I'm not. How could I leave you here?"

"You'd better not," she muttered, hating the shrill relief in her voice.

"I would never," Charles said, gentle. "We are each other's home, now. When I go to university, I'll take you with me. Father has a place in New York — it'll do us until England."

 

* * *

_1960_

"I didn't think London would be so..."

"Come now, Raven. Give the city a chance to prove herself." Charles's nose was pressed to the window of their taxi, pointing out this-and-that, the place where Lady Whoever took him to tea, the hotel where Lord So-and-so apparently cornered Charles and told him that his mother had married beneath herself.

Charles gave her a chiding look.

"Your brain to yourself, Charles, not in mine." But she couldn't make herself sound angry, not now — not when she finally knew the feel of another country's earth under her feet, the look of the sky above another corner of the world.

Charles had told her that food rationing ended only six years ago in England, a deprivation he was spared from in America — but Raven remembered the gnawing pain of hunger. Europe had had enough of wars and rebuilding, and was now shaking out her hair and pulling on a cocktail dress. London was clouded grey in the transition from summer to autumn, but _felt_ exciting.

"I want her dress," Raven declared, turning in her seat to stare at a young woman in a royal-blue minidress, the heels of her boots clipping sharply against the pavement. The woman's platinum blonde coiffure shone brightly against a dingy shop front, her hair daringly and defiantly bleached into a comic book's artificial palette. She was different and proud of it — beautiful.

Charles choked. "Her hemline's a little short, don't you think?"

She rolled her eyes, still watching the platinum-topped head disappear around a corner. "You're such a prude."

"It's all changed now," Charles murmured, looking at the city's skyline. "I don't remember this many buildings and people. But the air _is_ rather cleaner now — proof that laws do work, I suppose."

"Stop ruining my experience," Raven said, slapping his arm. She felt a brief pang of homesickness for New York, which she easily squashed. " _I_ didn't get to eat cornflakes at some dead duchess's cocktail party, so stop trying to make me see things through what _you_ did."

"It was Rice Krispies, and Mother thought it was chic."

Charles did, at least, shut up for a bit while she took in the streets, and the buildings receding behind them as the car headed to the train station. Until he started complaining about how there was only cheddar to be found in the shops, _Father used to love English cheeses_ , and then Raven had to smother him with his own scarf.

 

* * *

_1961_

In Rome, Charles followed a trace of a song to the Spanish Steps and a young man who might be just like them: _gifted_ , in Charles's language. Raven, tagging behind, scuffed her feet on the sun-baked stones and surreptitiously rolled up her sleeves — just like Audrey Hepburn, charming a Gregory Peck who was out to make a profit off her. It didn't feel quite right, like bearskin on a fish, but Charles was turning back now, and he'd ask questions if he saw her unrolling her sleeves.

_And god forbid I use my powers in the middle of the Piazza di Spagna_ , Raven thought, resentful. Or worse, her own skin.

Charles was shaking his head. "No such luck," he said. "He was just exceptionally good at guesswork."

Raven lifted her shoulders. "He watches people a lot. But your telepathy's getting better."

"I can already find you in a crowded train station." He smiled at her. "By this time next year, I'll be able to find one person in an entire city. There must be others like us — I just have to train myself to tell mutants apart."

She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. "Let's have lunch," she said, because sometimes a sister didn't want to ask her brother if he'd tell the others to hide, too.

 

* * *

_1962_

"I want to go to Paris," Raven said, throwing a pile of magazines onto Charles's desk.

"I'm busy," Charles snapped, not looking up from his incomprehensible notes. He swiped the magazines aside irritably, blind to the glossy photographs of Anouk Aimée and Jean Seberg — women entirely unlike the film stars Raven had watched a milion times in America.

"Don't you dare!" Raven shouted, scrambling to save the magazines. They fell to the floor, splaying open to where Raven had cracked the spine, studying the contours of Paris until she could see every line in the stonework, every tiny wave on the surface of the Seine.

She'd swiped them from a customer at the restaurant where she worked, sneaking the magazines into her apron when he nipped to the loo. Her manager had caught her at it, but Mrs Fairweather merely sighed and tsked at her, like a plump English hen with a wayward chick.

"Every girl needs a dream," was the only thing she said as Raven left for the night, the magazines rolled up safely in her bag.

Raven's eyes prickled with tears.

"We never go anywhere," she said.

Charles's shoulders tightened. "We went to Rome last summer," he said to his notes.

"Where you spent most of your time telling me not talk to anyone," she retorted.

"I didn't! That boy was a scoundrel and you know it."

"Stop vetting all my damn boyfriends!"

Charles, finally, deigned to acknowledge her and raised his eyes to hers. "You don't have boyfriends."

"Yes, thank you for reminding me that no one will ever love me."

Unexpectedly, suddenly, Charles's face folded into sorrow. "That's not true. _I_ love you."

"I know." They stared at each other, stricken, stymied into affection. Raven relented and pressed a kiss on the crown of his head. "But it doesn't make Oxford any less dreary. Charles, I'm bored. What happened to all our plans? Weren't we going to see the world?"

Charles pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, weary. "Where do you want to go, Raven?"

"Anywhere but here."

England wasn't Raven's first taste of freedom, but Charles had promised a new life for them, better even than their brief sojourn in New York. She missed their pied à terre in the Upper West Side, where she made coffee and toast every morning before Charles went off to be scientific in Columbia. She missed the cinemas, the restaurants, the parks where ladies walked their dogs. She — guiltily — missed Charles's absence from their shared space and the hours it gave her to roam the city as she willed, free from his protectiveness.

_Oxford is a dump_ , she thought viciously. It was small and old, a place where everyone knew her by sight as "that American girl". In New York, she'd taken the form of a nurse, a policeman, and a matron draped in furs, and met almost as many people as Charles's mind had ever touched. In Oxford, a stranger was noticed and noted — but no one really knew her either.

"I promise," Charles said. "When I'm done with my thesis, we'll go to Japan. France. Anywhere you like."

 

* * *

_1958_

The old man behind the ticket counter squinted at her, half-suspicious and half-concerned. "Don't you have school, young lady?" he said, even as he handed her a ticket.

"I'm too old for school," Raven lied. She wasn't, but she'd never gone to school for more than a few weeks.

"You don't look a day older than sixteen." He squinted at her again. "Maybe I'm just getting old. Enjoy your movie, miss."

The theatre was cool and dark, almost completely empty but for two elderly women whispering to each other somewhere in the front rows. Raven chose a seat in the back, carefully away from the projector and any residual light. Safely hidden, her body flickered with with the reel: James Stewart as an acrophobic detective; tragic, deceptive Kim Novak in a grey dress looking out at San Francisco Bay.

_One day_ , Raven thought, _I'll stand right there, where she is_. She'd never been to San Francisco, or anywhere outside Westchester and New York City. When they were children, Charles had talked vaguely about her going to college, somewhere she'd never been. He'd lectured her pompously about the Importance of Education, but it'd been harder to fool an entire school than a family. Charles could make the teachers believe that she was his sister, but he couldn't make her name appear in the records. He could make Mother apply for a Social Security number for Raven, but he couldn't conjure a birth certificate out of thin air.

Eventually, Charles — in his fourteen-year-old wisdom — persuaded Mother and Kurt Marko to hire tutors for her. And he never stopped promising her any part of the world she cared to go by air or sea or land, when he was of age and they were finally free.

But wherever they were, whatever they were doing, Raven knew they were both pretending to be someone they weren't — as if being unwanted guests on this tiny slice of the world was ever enough for them. It was her and Charles against the world, and when Charles finally stopped pretending, the world wouldn't know what hit it.

Her scales fluttered, gleaming, across her body — _finally_ , she thought again, and _one day_. Ignoring the movie, Raven settled comfortably into her seat. She imagined herself and Charles setting sail into the wide, blue ocean, never once looking back.

 

 

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> From 1941 to 1976, US passports had green covers. The title, "named herein", is a phrase from the passport message: "The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection."
> 
> Following the Great Smog of 1952, which killed 4,000 people in London, the Clean Air Act 1956 was passed to reduce air pollution.
> 
> And that thing about Rice Krispies at a cocktail party? [It actually happened](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/10/arabella-boxer-english-food-review).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [“Dear heart, how like you this?” (seasoned traveller remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2141046) by [oonaseckar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar)




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